2013-2014 – The EU, Regional Conflicts and the Promotion of Regional Cooperation: A Successful Strategy for a Global Challenge? (REGIOCONF)

Regional conflicts are a core global challenge in that they threaten international peace and affect global actors either because of economic and strategic interests or because of challenges to normative claims. The European Union (EU) has been seen as a normative power able to help transform such conflicts.

A prominent strategy in this has been the promotion of regional integration through various forms of support for regional integration projects and strategies, from the Andean Community to the African Union. REGIOCONF aims at assessing this strategy by comparing EU involvement in different cases in the Mediterranean, Africa, Central and South America and East Asia.
It will explain the persistence of this strategy and the choice of particular instruments, assess its implementation, analyse local responses and the interaction with the global community, and determine the conditions under which a regionalisation strategy, as an instrument of conflict transformation, may be successful.
In doing so, it will enhance our understanding of a crucial part of EU external policy, make a contribution to the debate about sustainable peace strategies, and put forward policy recommendations about how to assist the transformation of regional conflicts more successfully.

Partners:University of Tubingen (Germany), Istituto Affari Internazionali (Italy), University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), University of Algiers (Algeria), University of Tsukaba (Japan).